When to prune apple trees?
- Botanical name
- Malus domestica
- Family
- Rosaceae
Apple trees are pruned from January to March. They are planted from October to March. They are harvested from August to October.
Apple trees are woody perennials. The edible part is the fruit.
Most varieties need a pollinator, another apple tree in flower at the same time. Self fertile varieties are few. A single apple tree in a garden therefore often carries no fruit.
The first three years go into the framework. The first small crop comes in the fourth or fifth year. The tree is pruned every year in late winter and trained to a central leader.
A late frost takes the blossom and with it the crop, while the tree itself comes to no harm. A mature tree in the ground needs little water. For a container it goes on the dwarfing rootstock M9 or M26.
Shoots, leaves and pips contain cyanogenic glycosides and are toxic to dogs and cats, most of all once cut branches have wilted. The pulp of the apple is safe to eat.
Apple trees through the year
- pruning
- planting
- harvest
In short
Growing conditions
Are apple trees toxic to cats and dogs?
Yes. Toxic to cats and dogs, toxic parts: stems, leaves and seeds.
Pests and diseases
Listed here is every problem for which the sources name this plant as a host. The problems are not listed in order of how common they are.
- Signs
- Colonies of small aphids sit on the shoot tips and the underside of the leaves. The leaf curls and puckers, and sticky honeydew is left on everything below. The viruses they carry are more dangerous than the feeding itself.
- Prevention
- Go easy on nitrogen, because soft sappy growth is what aphids are looking for. Encourage the predators (ladybirds, lacewings, parasitic wasps). Use a reflective mulch, which puts them off settling, and a strong jet of water to knock the colony off the tips.
- What to do
- Potassium soap works on contact and only while it is wet, so it has to reach the underside of the leaf. On drought-loving plants and in heat it can scorch, so apply it in the evening.
- Signs
- On the leaves there are olive green velvety blotches that darken later. On the fruit there are brown to black scabby patches. As the fruit swells, the skin beside a scab cannot follow and the fruit splits.
- Prevention
- The fungus overwinters on fallen leaves and infected shoots, so cleared leaves are the main measure: rake up and carry away every fallen leaf and fruit, and cut out affected shoots. A resistant variety is a difference that shows every year.
- What to do
- For the home garden there is nothing for a tree whose fruit is eaten. What is left is hygiene and the choice of variety.
- Signs
- A brown rot spreading across the fruit, with light brown cushions of spores on it, often in concentric rings. The fruit drops or stays on the branch as a dried mummy.
- Prevention
- The fungus overwinters in mummified fruit and in cankered wounds in the bark, so collect and remove every rotten and mummified fruit and cut out affected twigs. The infection enters through a wound, so a net against birds takes away the main door. In a cluster it passes from one fruit to the fruit it touches.
- What to do
- For the home garden there are no fungicides against brown rot. What is left is picking off and removing the mummies as they appear and choosing less susceptible varieties.
- Signs
- In the ripening fruit sits a white caterpillar with a brown head, feeding in the core. On the side of the fruit or at the calyx there is an exit hole, and a fruit cut open shows a tunnel and heaps of droppings. Attacked fruit ripens and drops early.
- Prevention
- A pheromone trap hung in the tree in May does not put the pest down, but it tells you when the males are flying, and with that when any measure makes sense. Encourage birds, wasps and ground beetles. Collect the windfalls as they drop, so that the caterpillars do not withdraw into the soil.
- What to do
- For the home garden the measures are pheromone traps to follow the flight (on a lone tree they catch enough males for fewer eggs to be fertilised), picking off the attacked fruit and beneficial nematodes sprayed onto the trunk, the branches and the soil under the crown in autumn, when the caterpillars leave the fruit.
- Signs
- The blossoms wilt and blacken suddenly at flowering, the shoots dry up and curl like a shepherd's crook, as if the tree had been scorched. In wet weather a white slime oozes from the infection. Peel the bark at the edge of the infection and the wood under it is foxy red brown. Sunken dead patches form on the branches.
- Prevention
- The disease attacks the pome fruit: apple, pear and quince. Remove late, secondary blossoms before they open.
- What to do
- There are no products. Cut the infected parts out at once: peel the bark, look for the red brown staining and cut back to healthy wood well below it, on thicker branches a good deal further. Disinfect the tools between every cut. Burn what you cut off or take it away from the garden. In some countries the disease is under official control, so report a suspicion to the plant health service.
- Signs
- The plant dies suddenly, often in mid season and without any decline beforehand. Peel the bark at ground level and under it there is a white or cream sheet of fungal tissue, thin as the skin of a mushroom. In the soil there are black or brown strands like bootlaces. In late summer and autumn tufts of honey brown mushrooms with a whitish ring on the stalk appear by the stumps or over dead roots.
- Prevention
- The fungus spreads through the soil with its strands, from a few centimetres to a good hand's width below the surface, and infects the roots of a living plant when it touches them. So do not leave stumps and dead roots in the ground. No plant is completely resistant, but privet, lilac, viburnum, weigela, forsythia, butterfly bush, rhododendron, thuja and walnut are particularly susceptible.
- What to do
- There are no products. The only thing that works is digging out and removing every infected root and stump, which takes away the food without which the strands in the soil do not grow. A vertical barrier of rubber or thick plastic sheet, buried about half a metre deep and standing a few centimetres above ground, stops the spread into an unaffected part of the garden.
- Signs
- The foliage on one branch takes on a silver sheen and the branch then dies. Cut across, the dead branch has an irregular dark stain in the middle that does not follow the rings. On old dead branches bracket fungi grow later, with a whitish woolly upper side and a purple brown underside. A silver sheen without the dark stain in the wood is not this disease but the result of drought or cold.
- Prevention
- The spores are active from September to May and enter through wounds, above all through pruning cuts. Remove dead wood before fruiting bodies grow on it.
- What to do
- Cut the affected branch off as soon as you can, well below the point where the dark stain in the wood ends. Disinfect the tools as you go and remove the cuttings at once, because fruiting bodies go on developing on branches left lying about. Do not paint the wounds as a matter of routine, but do it where the disease keeps coming back.
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Related plants
The plants below are in the same botanical family (Rosaceae).
Sources about the plant: ASPCA Toxic and Non-Toxic Plants, Clemson Cooperative Extension, GBIF Backbone Taxonomy, Iowa State University Extension, NC State Extension Plant Toolbox, Royal Horticultural Society, University of Maryland Extension, Wikidata. Checked between 14 and 28 August 2026. The problem descriptions also draw on: EPPO Global Database, University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension, Utah State University Extension.